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Brigid Delaney: This Restless Life

Am reading Brigid Delaney’s new book, This Restless Life. Chapter on Work is excellent. Details the downfalls of contracts/temping, which is what employers want. Crap if you want decent pay, superannuation, holiday pay and sick leave and ability to build a life.

She points out only the super-highly-paid truly benefit from temp contracts. The rest of us suffer.

“Most portfolio workers toil in the backwash of the restless economy. They talk about their work stretching to six or seven days a week … they are isolated, their hours are unpredictable or antisocial, and they live with the unnerving prospect that a source of income could be cut off without warning. They are a species unprotected from the whims and changes of fortune of the labour market.”

“He is going to slip down a rung to where I am, white-knuckled, still pyjama-clad in the afternoon, checking my bank account online with a measure of dread and fear.”